Idea - Solid IC Economy

My idea is to set a standard sort of wage for a company, determined by how many members (None Alts) the company has. For instance, noones paying 30 million for a bounty, unless it's obviously counterfeit or they're willing to bankrupt their assets, but the problem with this is it's been suggested many times before Unix, and the Mods don't want to force things on people (Just my take/opinion don't hold me to this please I don't mean to speak for them) that may or may not be a Economy.

And even my idea would force so much on people, maybe instead, just set a standard value for Pixels, 1$ 1P is what most people go for, but I don't think everyone follows that.

 

Crap I missed everything you said on the OP-- FAST ADD SOMETHING PRODUCTIVE

Uhm, most people who see this as a problem use Chit, especially T.D. (I think Aiko? I don't know) as a sort of non-official currency to get around the outrageousness of saying 'I have three billion Pixels from my wandering around the Galaxy' not that they do that or anything, just an example of something that could be done, people who care much can use Chit/Credit and others can use Pixels, perhaps in their outrageous inflated status, man i'm kinda sounding jerkish here but whatever I don't mean to be mean.

just throwin' ideas

 

I don't see the real problem. The only real reason to have such a thing would be to prevent people from pulling stupid sums out of their asses, and we don't let people do that anyway.

 

People do actually do that though. If you look at the Liberty Mills Bounty board, I can assure you that most feral Florans don't have 20k pixels just sitting around to blow on catching that guy who mugged them that one time. I've been thinking about this too, even if people just had to grant mods a reasonable starting amount of currency when their character was made, then report major fluctuations in their spending.

Something like this should at the very least be implemented for factions, because the research and hiring abilities of factions are a bit out of hand.

 

Giving characters a starting amount of money would be a good idea but some characters already have a IC reason to have more than average and some have an IC reason to be having below average. Lawful primitive Floran: Below average. Corrupted business man: Above average. Maybe there should be some sort of application for granting your character more money? Though I think that would end up falling to ruin with things like "He look! I found a planet made of diamonds and gold which I sold for a Googolplexian worth of pixels, Mr.Admin can I has da money naow?" I can see this would probably put a lot of strain on the admins and may not be the best but Jesus, its got to be better than what we currently have!

 

I've seen this suggestion more than once and replied with the same answer. It's not feasible. It's not possible. The community is irresponsible and can't handle an economy, let alone a simple combat situation. I don't trust most of the community with the responsibility of managing an economy, nor do I think I ever will. Seal of disapproval, 0/10.

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Countless factions are already dead/dying due to lack of activity. We don't need another limiting factor.

 

I don't see the correlation between activity and money, care to enlighten?

 

I've mentioned this before, and I'll say it again: It's possible to extrapolate the economic system of Starbound if we look up the values for given sets of furniture and equate them to real-world money for the sake of perspective. An example: Here is an Impervium Chair. In-game, it has a set worth of 600 pixels. Within a market where ships cruise through the galaxy on a daily basis, what would be a decent price for a ship? By taking account of all the items on a ship and their in-game set prices, weighed with the costs of the materials used to make the rest of the ship (to which we can mirror with car prices due to how common ships are, and how the more common an item being sold is, the less it's worth), you can more or less gauge the value in pixels. From there, it's just a matter of matching the product with the right price, whether it's clothing, weapons, ammo, fuel, and the like. It's a lot of math, but it can be done if you take the moment to sit down and take all that math in from behind.

Anything in-game that has an unsuitable price for incredibly glaring reasons can have it's price modified by the vendor. You can argue that pricing is subjective to the person selling the product, but whoever is buying said product will only fork over so much for such a price before they flip you the bird and go to someone else. That is basic Business 101.

Now naturally, there's an issue with this: It's too damn complicated. As stated here:

Sadly, he's right. Simply put, you can't rely on people focusing on such complex mechanics like internal economics and the ilk because, in all honesty, that's no fun. Roleplaying is meant to be fun; it's not meant to be Tax-Simulator 3000. But then, this comes up:

Which is a valid point. This doesn't seem to be a problem with factions, honestly, but some people don't seem to comprehend the monetary values that they put down for things, to the point where it's out of touch and detached from reality, even more so in a medium where you're meant to be detached from reality in the first place, which only speaks more for the point at hand.

I feel that the best solution, and the best compromise to this, would be to create a F.A.Q. that can be used as a reference and rule of thumb for pricing ranges on objects, ships, and the like, and give tips on how factions can properly explain sources of income and establish how they get money, if they want to. If people don't know what to properly price things, or need help doing so, this F.A.Q. can be used as an excellent guideline and tool to have a general handle on what could be approximated as decent pricing of things, for those who want to. Quite frankly, as established before, you can't enforce it to a given extent. Finally:

Money is an irrelevant point when it comes to the death of a group, wherever or whatever it may be in any context. You don't need money to start a faction, since a faction is a group of folks working together over something. It's an excellent incentive, sure, but I'm pretty certain that the majority of these factions didn't come together because of money at all. In fact, just to double-check, I decided to re-read the current listed official factions in the forums; there are only two that have expressed means of attaining money as their primary goals (Exxon, Relzurruat Armada), while others have made it available as a side thing for people to buy and sell from and entice a faux-economy there. The rest are small cities and groups that have banded together over a common ideal; something which all factions share. The factions that are dying are because there's nothing to really do in it; it's just there. Money or not, they'll die out anyway, so it wouldn't be a limiting factor at all.

 

I think it was Keycross who I was talking to about this, and he has a really good rule of thumb. Money is like any other ingame asset, such as intelligence or strength. Having a lot of it for no reason is powergaming.

"
I feel that the best solution, and the best compromise to this, would be to create a F.A.Q. that can be used as a reference and rule of thumb for pricing ranges on objects, ships, and the like, and give tips on how factions can properly explain sources of income and establish how they get money, if they want to. If people don't know what to properly price things, or need help doing so, this F.A.Q. can be used as an excellent guideline and tool to have a general handle on what could be approximated as decent pricing of things, for those who want to."

This is a beautiful idea.

 

You talked about how the hiring capabilities of factions are out of control, so that implies the solution would be limiting how factions hire people.

 

Sorry, I could have specified. That was also related to R&D divisions and such. I know that for example, the Relzurautt Armada's military very frequently puts out new versions of weaponry and outfits its troops with them, which for such a large organization is very plausible, but at the same time could easily grow far out of proportion.

 

I don't know which feral Floran you may be referring to, but I can assure you it is not one that I have accepted a bounty posting from.
The closest individual to your description is Sen, and he's a known arms dealer with a shop in the Mills. Ariexe is the only other Floran who posted a bounty, and it literally would have cleaned out all his cash. If any "feral florans" offered such a bounty, the board either rejected it outright, or has speculated that it is counterfeit.

The Bounty Board has been an interesting experiment of mine... Yet, I continue to try to keep it as a plausible estimate for the size of the currency. Our biggest bounties invariably come from factions, or in the case of the cartels, multiple factions, with the highest only being a million. When it comes to pixel inflation, that's pretty conservative, compared to known examples. A Minnow Interceptor ship from Carroli Corp would cost 15 million, for example; 15 times the bounty for the leader of an international terrorist group.

Thus far, I feel like the best way to set a standard for currency is thus: watch each other on the forums, and try to keep it to scale as hard as you can. When something seems wildly out of bounds, just label it as "likely counterfeit" and bugger on. That's really all one can do. The more you put prices in writing, the more people will have to gauge things by.